Legal documents ideally suited for Internet's World Wide Web

STANFORD -- Law Professor Joseph A. Grundfest recently added a novel
electronic twist to the process of filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme
Court.

Thanks to a paper submitted by one of his students, the former
Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Comission supplemented his
filing of the required paper version of a friend-of-the- court brief with an
electronic version posted on the World Wide Web, the Internet's new graphical
interface.

As far as the law professor can determine, it is the first Supreme Court
brief that has been prepared in this fashion.

The Web version of the legal document contains special "hypertext links" -
citations displayed in blue - that with the click of a mouse transfer the
reader to information stored at another location of the Web. That location
can be on the same computer system or on a machine in another part of the
world.

In the hypertext brief, the reader can click on any citation to any case
law precedent and immediately be taken to the full text of the precedent
cited, opened to the very page cited.

"The entire process of legal argument is ideally suited to hypertext and
the Web," Grundfest said. "Much of the law is based on precedent, and the Web
allows these precedents to be made an integral part of a legal document.
Putting this brief on the Web is a 'proof of concept.' "

According to David Johnson, head of Lexis Counsel Connect, an online
system for lawyers, "this puts Joe into rarified company. Very few law
professors are exploring the potential of this new medium. There is a real
prospect for creating a shared electronic workspace - a courtroom without
walls, as it were - where lawyers can place legal documents of all sorts and
link them together."

The inspiration for the innovation belongs to recent Law School graduate
Alex Benn. Instead of submitting a 30-page paper as a course requirement,
Benn simply handed Grundfest a note with the address of his hypertext paper
posted on the Web.

"It was a joy reading the paper because all the supporting material was
right there at my fingertips. It was also very easy giving Alex a high grade
for the effort," Grundfest said. "Alex's paper made the next step obvious. If
hypertext could bring a student paper to life, imagine what it could do for a
legal brief!"

Grundfest's brief asks the Supreme Court to address a case (Montgomery
Securities vs. Dannenberg) that deals with the specific state of mind that a
person must have before he or she can be charged for securities fraud. He
filed the document on behalf of the American Bankers Association, the
American Electronics Association, the Association of Publicly Traded
Companies, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Securities
Industry Association, all of whom argue that resolving this question is
important.

The actual programming to create a hypertext version of the brief was
performed by Craig Jacoby, a second-year law student at Stanford.

"I get all my good new ideas from my students," Grundfest confessed.

The links were made possible by a special arrangement with West
Publishing's WESTLAW, one of the two largest computer- assisted legal
research services in the country.

"Providing links for Professor Grundfest's brief is an ideal
implementation of the dynamic capabilities of the World Wide Web." said
Laurie Hansen, West Office Automation Manager. "West created hypertext links
to the 27 cases, five statutes and two rules referenced in the brief. To do
so, we loaded our editorially enhanced versions of these documents to our Web
server, and added extra display features, such as the centering of titles and
italicizing of cited references."

Grundfest also would have liked to link other material, such as excerpts
from books, but the sources were not available online. "The information
highway doesn't lead to everything yet, but soon it will," Grundfest said.

"This is the future," he predicted. "The legal system will initially learn
about the Internet through supplemental postings that don't replace paper.
Gradually, we may evolve to an environment where hypertext postings on the
net are the rule, not the exception."

The brief can be found on the World Wide Web at:

http://www.Stanford.Edu/group/law/reckless

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